National Book Foundation Presents Award to Publisher of Antisemitic Tracts

On November 20, the National Book Foundation dishonored itself by honoring W. Paul Coates, founder of Black Classic Press, with a “lifetime achievement award.” Among his lifetime achievements has been his republishing of rabid antisemitic tracts. More on the disgraceful choice can be found here: “National Book Foundation facing scrutiny from Jewish groups over Paul Coates award,” by Matthew Kassel, Jewish Insider, November 18, 2024:

The National Book Foundation is facing criticism from several Jewish groups for its decision to move forward in presenting a lifetime achievement award to Paul Coates, the founder of Black Classic Press, at its annual reception later this week — even after he was recently found to have republished antisemitic and homophobic texts.

Coates, the father of the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, is set to receive [by now he has received it] the prestigious literary award at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony in New York City on Wednesday, where he will be [was] honored for his longtime dedication to “celebrating the life of Black writers and bolstering their literary legacies” through his publishing company, founded in 1978.

But Coates, 78, has come under scrutiny in recent months for including in his catalog an antisemitic screed called The Jewish Onslaught, published in 1993 by Tony Martin, a former professor of Africana studies at Wellesley College, who sought to uphold a widely discredited conspiracy theory alleging Jewish domination of the Atlantic slave trade….

Tony Martin’s The Jewish Onslaught was one of several antisemitic books that Coates apparently thought worthy of being republished; he not only brought them back into print, but provided his own laudatory blurbs. The late Tony Martin was so celebrated an antisemite that in June 2002, he presented a talk entitled “Tactics of Organized Jewry in Suppressing Free Speech” at a conference sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an antisemitic publication. In this speech, he discussed the controversy that had arisen from his claims that Jews were the principal actors in the slave trade.

The Institute for Historical Review was the neo-Nazi company Tony Martin kept. And apparently Paul Coates had no objections to championing, by publishing, the best known antisemitic tract by this man.

The National Book Foundation claimed that it “condemns antisemitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and hatred in all its forms,” and that it “also supports freedom of expression and the right of any publisher to make its own determination on what it chooses to publish. Anyone examining the work of any publisher, over the course of almost five decades, will find individual works or opinions with which they disagree or find offensive.”

There are books with which one might, as the National Book Foundation so primly puts it, “disagree or find offensive” that nonetheless should be published. But are there not certain opinions that go beyond the pale? Think only of what would have happened had Coates been a white publisher in Mississippi who specialized in publishing out-of-print books by Southern authors. And among those out-of-print authors were several from the antebellum south who wrote defenses of slavery, including arguing that blacks were distinctly inferior in intelligence to whites, unable to fend for themselves, and therefore were actually better off as slaves and benefited from “the peculiar institution.” Would the National Book Foundation ever honor such a publisher, given him a “lifetime achievement award”?

Coates removed one of Tony Martin’s books — The Jewish Onslaught — from the Black Classic Press website, but he has not destroyed all the copies he published; he has not announced that The Jewish Onslaught will no longer be sold; it may not be advertised online, but apparently copies can still be bought. Coates has just republished a book on Marcus Garvey with a foreword by Tony Martin. He has yet to apologize for having published The Jewish Onslaught. Coates also publishes the pseudo-histories — collections of falsehoods, really — of the late Yosef Ben Yochanan, a bizarre figure who claimed that the real Jews are black Africans. Yosef Ben Yochanan’s quack histories, his made-up academic credentials, his house blend of lies and deep ignorance, are what Coates is helping to spread by publishing his works. He’s not doing the black population of America any good by publishing eleven books by such a mountebank; he’s helping only to deepen the confusion and ignorance of those who buy Ben Yochanan’s books. Coates calls the semi-demented Ben Yochanan his favorite author, with whom, he says, he had “a close personal relationship.”

Coates’ choice of what to publish is not based on literary or historical merit. He will publish, or republish, books by black authors for that reason only — it’s not the quality of the product, but the identity of the producer that determines publication. He has no objection to publishing the rankest antisemitism, whether it comes from the late Tony Martin on the all-powerful Jews who “monopolized the African slave trade” and then try to silence such brave truth-tellers as himself, or from Yonah Ben Yochanan, who denied that those who now call themselves Jews really are Jews.That distinction, he claimed in book after semi-literate book, belongs to black Africans. And there are others he publishes, beyond Martin and Ben Yochanan, who engage in their own form of Jew-baiting.

Along with all that ahistorical trash Coates offers at Black Classic Press, a handful of the books he publishes, mostly the detective stories by Walter Mosley, are not so easily dismissed. But they hardly entitle him to have a Lifetime Achievement Award lavished upon him. He has done a great deal of harm to black readers, especially the young, who buy and read and believe the fantastical tales of that incorrigible mythomane Yonah Ben Yochanan and other “historians” Coates uncritically publishes and promotes. By giving this award to Coates, the National Book Foundation is putting its imprimatur on his offerings. And that includes the antisemitic texts by Tony Martin and others. So even if he has now decided, just to relieve some of the pressure, to at long last remove the rancid tract — with Coates’ blurb of praise on the back jacket — from his online catalogue, that does not make up for his years of enthusiastically promoting the book.

Let me repeat again the hypothetical I offered earlier in this piece. Imagine a white publisher in Mississippi putting out works by antebellum southern writers whose books had long been out of print, preserving them for posterity. And among those books there were a few that argued for white supremacy, even made an argument for slavery, based on the claim that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites and benefited from being held, and “taken care of,” by their white owners. Would the National Book Foundation give that publisher any kind of award? Why then was W. Paul Coates, who has published antisemitic tracts not any less offensive or less dangerous than those white supremacist works published by my hypothetical Mississippian, given — shamefully — that award?